I don't think English is that complicated, really. I think the main problem is that it just has way too many exceptions. It's a partly deteriorated hodge-podge of a language, and so its difficulty, it seems to me, lies not in the complexity of its grammar but rather in its lack of unity and order.
I do think you have a point, though. I'm not sure the thinking of a person who speaks another language is any less complex (and you'd probably get a tomato hurled at you if you suggested that too loudly, anyway), but certainly it is different. Languages all have different characters, and since we all think in words, certainly our language influence our thinking process. At some point, I'd like to learn a language that isn't Indo-European, especially, since all the languages I know anything about have a lot of grammatical similarities.
But certainly, for example, if a sentence is typically structured in a certain way, then one's thinking is structured in the same way. Or for example, the fact that we have many different verb tenses means that, not only can we better express things chronogically, but we are more used to thinking about how things relate to each other along a linear concept of time. Whereas if we didn't have so many verb tenses, it just wouldn't occur to us very readily to make a chronogical distinction which we couldn't express and to which we couldn't put a name.
An interesting thing: I'm studying Classical Greek at school, and though I'm just a beginner, I'm getting familiar with a few of the typical Greek sentence structures that they're pounding into our brains. One thing I've noticed is that it is common in Greek to present everything as a contrast to something else, to set up sentence in a way that show opposing ideas, in a way. And the other day I was thinking, jeez, isn't it interesting how much this has influenced our rhetorical traditions? One of the strongest rhetorical devices I can think of is to set two things up in opposition to each other; and where do we get so many of our Western ideas about rhetoric? From the Romans! And isn't it interesting that the educated Romans all spoke Greek? So I was speculating that perhaps this rhetorical device, something which is much more common in Greek, arose because the thinking of these educated Roman orators was influenced by Greek language patterns.
Anyway, that's just speculation. Could be just hogwash, for all I know.
This sort of fits into my own theory, though, that at least 85% of good writing (in a language in which you are fluent) is good thinking. People always ask me why I'm so anal about grammar, but really, it's because I strongly believe that it improves your thinking (and also because I just find it fun, but whatever). If you can understand how parts of a sentence fit together, then you can understand how sentences fit together in a paragraph, which means that you can better understand the logical flow of ideas. When I edit other people's essays (I like doing this; I find it fun), most of the grammatical problems I see are there because the person hasn't thought the idea through fully and doesn't really understand how it all fits together. And when an idea is hazy in the first place, it is still hazy when you try to write it down; but if the idea is clear in your mind, well-thought-out in the first place, then when you write it down, even if you don't understand grammar as well as you should, things just sort of fall into place naturally. So it is my belief that if you codify your thinking patterns through the study of language structure, then you are able to form logical trains of thought much more easily.
Oh, and also, speaking of language and thought, I think there is also a connection between the sound of a language and the temperament of its people. If you listen to a language, and then look at its speakers' art, music, literature, etc., then you start to notice some patterns, I think. Do you folks get this too, or am I crazy?
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